$175 Million Picasso Is The Most Expensive Painting Ever Sold At Auction

The 1955 cubist masterpiece "Les femmes d'Alger" — or "Women of Algiers" — (Version "O") just set a new world record.

Pablo Picasso's 1995 painting "Les femmes d'Alger" — or "Women of Algiers" — (Version "O") sold for $174.9 million at Christie's auction house Monday night. The price was the highest a piece of art has ever fetched at auction, and well over the $140 million it was expected to get.

And while the new owner of the cubist masterpiece has not been revealed, details about the work itself have been well documented.

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According to Christie's, Picasso introduced a new style of painting when creating the piece, which was inspired by 19th-century French master Eugene Delacroix.

Version "O" is the culmination of a "herculean project" that Picasso started as an homage to his late friend and fellow artist Henri Matisse, Christie's explains. Matisse had died in November 1954, five weeks before Picasso began the series.

Described as the most opulent and the most highly finished work from his 1954-55 Femmes d'Alger series (each piece is designated A through O), Version "O" has been featured the world over, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery in London, and recently at the Louvre in Paris.

The last time the Version "O" was featured at auction, in 1997, it sold for $31.9 million as part of the record-breaking sale of the Collection of Victor and Sally Ganz.

The previous all-time auction high, also at Christie's, was in November 2013 when Elaine Wynn, co-founder of the Wynn casino empire paid $142.4 million for Francis Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud," The New York Times reports.

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